Unhappily, some idealists are so committed to improving the world THEIR WAY, that they lose patience and and either imprison or kill those who oppose them. Think Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, and others. Idealists all.

Notice, I did not put Marx on the above list. Some or many capitalists are paranoid.

And this, some GOP'ers say socialism is Communism.

A few even say democracy is socialism. Real democracy (not the seriously limited American kind) might lead to a form of socialism: employee ownership of their workplaces.

A book published five years ago claimed that employees own more than eleven thousand American companies. I was scanning the book at the library and was so UNsurprised that I didn't bother to note the title or author.

While living in SF 20 years ago and browsing a bookstore, I found a directory of northern CA companies owned by their employees. I didn't look for the number of such companies.

In the early 1970s, an edition of Harvard Business Review cited two advantages of employee ownership; it's kinder to the environment and there's less employee theft.

The real question though is whether the philosopher didn't think it through far enough to see problems inherent (i.e., that will inevitably arise) in what he advocated, given that real people would have to adopt the system, and they live in a real world where sometimes things just go wrong, up to and including things we still quaintly refer to as "acts of god."

The mistake might be of the same order of seriousness as forgetting to design bathrooms into an office building, but much more subtle because the philosopher is working at a much higher level of abstraction.

"In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat."

I think he had a pretty decent idea, it's not exactly a secret that people tend to object if you take stuff they consider theirs. Socialists in general don't mind a few broken eggs if they want an omelette, and it's quite easy to dismiss traitors in any event. Marx offered little in terms of concrete policy (even less than Romney!) and merely presented general ideas often based on extrapolating and interpreting the past into the future. The groundwork for implementation was in large part made by Lenin, though a number of others have also worked on that aspect, chief among them Mao and Trotsky.